From John Edwards, we have the answer: a baby in the womb becomes a human being precisely at the moment it's worth $6.5 million to a trial lawyer.

Whatever side you may take in the abortion debate, I think we can agree that everything hinges on whether that thing in the uterus is a human being.  If not, then abortion is just another medical procedure, and nobody's business but your own.  If it's a person, on the other hand, we've got real problems.  That's why abortion advocates resort to euphemisms and peripraxis, saying things like "fetus" for baby, and "intact dilation and extraction" or "late-term abortion" for partially delivering a baby and then crushing its skull.

Hard as it's been to pin these people down all the decades of debate since Roe v.Wade, I think we've achieved a major breakthrough this week.  For the scions of the Party of Abortion have now been named, and they've left a paper trail.

Last week John Kerry let it be known that he believes human life begins at conception.  He still supports abortion on demand, however, and as far as I can tell there are two reasons: first, being a Democrat, he thinks that strong moral convictions are just dandy as long as we keep them to ourselves and never act on them.  Second, abortions equal votes in his constituency.  Come to think of it, there's a third reason: Flip Kerry, alter ego of Flop Kerry, is probably the one who spoke to reporters last week, while Flop is the one who does the voting in the Senate.  Those two reflexively oppose each other, as when Flip voted to oppose funding for the Iraq war right after Flop voted for it.

So for the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, human life begins in the womb when it's able to draw votes, which means that when it begins depends on whom he's speaking to.

Our putative Democratic vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, has also answered this question before.  Seems in his previous life as a trial lawyer, he once coaxed a $6.5 million verdict out of a jury by explaining how an unborn child communicated with him, and, in fact, was speaking through him in the courtroom:

"She said at 3, 'I'm fine.'  She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble but I'm doing OK.'  Five, she said 'I'm having problems.'  At 5:30, she said 'I need out.'"  He climaxed his peroration with "She speaks to you through me, and I have to tell you right now — I didn't plan to talk about this — right now I feel her.  I feel her presence.  She's inside me, and she's talking to you."

The unfortunate child in question suffered brain injury before birth, and Mr. Edwards, describing the recording of the fetal heart monitor, convinced the jury that the brain injury occurred because the obstetrician waited too long before delivering the baby by caesarean section.  Mr. Edwards and his fellow trial lawyers went on to rake in vast fortunes with that scam, even though it turns out that cerebral palsy occurs well before labor starts.  Today, in places like West Virginia, you can't find an obstetrician to deliver your baby without going out-of-state.  No word on whether Mr. Edwards hears those babies.

So, from Mr. Edwards, we have the other answer: a baby in the womb becomes a human being precisely at the moment it's worth $6.5 million to a trial lawyer.  Until it achieves that net worth, apparently, John Edwards can't hear it,  it can't speak through him to a jury, and you can go ahead and abort it.

And of course, if you can't speak through John Edwards and become a baby, what does that make you?

A choice.